Tim, you make some good points. But I think Amey01 is right. Your points are more applicable to a lower end, mass producer than to a maker of an expensive high end niche product. My fear is that this change in policy is just a small part of MartinLogan's overall move toward becoming a more mainstream mass supplier of lower end audio components (think Bose, Klipsch, Polk, etc.) than an exclusive high end audio company.
If your points were really relevant to this business, I think ARC, CJ, Mac, Soundlab, Quad, Maggie, etc. etc., would have all come out with these policies limiting support of older models already. The fact that they persist in supporting all or most of their older products would strongly suggest otherwise.
For those members of this forum that have purchased higher end products from MartinLogan (meaning those costing from $2,000 to upwards of $20,000 a pair), ask yourselves these questions:
If, when you bought your first pair of Logans, you were told that your speaker had a limited life span (from ten to twenty years) and that the company making it would not necessarily support it when it died, how many of you would have plunked down the change for your Logans vs. exploring other brands?
If you looked on Audiogon and used values for the speakers from that company were a tenth of the retail cost after just a few years, would that impact your decision to buy them new at full retail cost?
How many of you, after purchasing your Logans, have since purchased numerous other models of Logans? Recommended them to friends? Would this policy have changed your mind on those choices?
Finally, for those that bought your speakers on the used market, would you have purchased those speakers for that kind of money if you knew it would be unlikely that you would be able to get replacement panels for that model?
My point here is that if used prices don't hold their value, people are going to be less likely to upgrade from an older to a newer model Logan. Right now, I can sell my Summits for half what I paid for them if I want to upgrade to CLX. If they were currently worth a tenth of their retail value instead of half, I certainly wouldn't be as likely to consider upgrading to the newer, more expensive model. And if used prices fall off a cliff, people are going to be unwilling to pay the huge retail markups for the new products.
These are the types of considerations that a company catering to the high end must take into consideration. They are not considerations for a company that focuses on selling mid-fi products to Best Buy customers. It seems pretty clear to me that MartinLogan is in the process of transforming themselves from the former into the latter.
All of that is fine enough if you're talking about some mom and pop shop catering to the needs of a nieche market, but that's not the type of organization we're talking about here. Martin Logan is indeed trying to compete at a much higher level.
Actually, I would say they are trying to compete at a much lower level. They are forsaking the high end market in an effort to compete in a very crowded and probably diminishing home theater market that has much lower margins. I will be very surprised if this is a successful strategy for them.
. . . but I also know that if ML doesn't have a diverse enough offering to serve as the foundation for the business they certainly won't be around long enough to sell us any kind of product, be it entry level Motion series home theater speakers or the CLX (and it's successors we hope). In these times it's all about generating revenue.
There are way too many successful companies at the high end for me to buy into this notion. You were at RMAF. You saw all the niche companies with great products that are surviving just fine in this economy, as well as many of the large, established ones. (Tellingly, MartinLogan was not among them). Will the economy weed some of them out? Sure. It always has. But well-known companies with established reputations seem to be doing just fine. I haven't heard any rumblings about ARC or Mac Or CJ or Wilson or Soundlab or Magnepan, etc. going out of business because they can't compete in this economy. I also don't see any of those brands at Best Buy.
It really isn't a question of whether they have to do this to survive. This is a calculated decision to meet strict gross sales and profit objectives set by a parent company that has no clue or care about the high end audio industry. The fact that their current CEO has absolutely no experience in the high end audio industry is a huge clue in that regard. Just about every successful HIGH END audio company I can think of is run by someone who has been in the business for decades. The decisions being made at MartinLogan these days seem to be in complete disregard for the nature of the high end audio business and their long term brand reputation in that industry. They seem to be focused on increasing sales and profits at the expense of everything else they have become known for over the last thirty years.
And you may barely have noticed that Canada also has more golds than the US. Clearly, US super power days are over, but more importantly...
